I often hear business leaders I coach working on their strategic plans. Where do we want to be in 5 years from now? What are our strategic intentions for the year ahead? Well, I would offer that the best of strategic planning typically only delivers some good ideas. And only a small fraction of those good ideas are ever successfully implemented, so I would further offer that strategic plans may be the wrong plans to be focusing on!
If you want to achieve peak performance and produce breakthrough results in your organization, you must look much shorter-term. In addition to having a clear vision for the future, you must also have a clear sense of how you are actually going to implement your “micro goals” and very next steps for achieving that longer-term vision.
If we consider goals to be those long-range strategic targets, then micro goals are the near-term actions required to get us from here to there. Micro goals are the baby steps required for us to be able to walk a whole mile. So many of the executives and team members I work with find it difficult to maintain focus on a long-range planning horizon, so micro goals serve to keep us on track when we get distracted by other priorities and opportunities along the journey from here to there.
If you are accustomed to convening strategic planning sessions with your teams once a year, and you are accustomed to only achieving 10 to 25 to maybe 50% of what you declare you will achieve, then it may be time for you to establish your 30-60-90 Day Implementation plan. Quarterly milestone targets are useful for keeping us directionally on track. I find that even these 90-day targets need to be broken down into 30 and 60-day micro goals though for us to truly be successful in achieving peak performance and producing breakthrough results. Any longer-term planning is insufficient for holding organizational attention. Any longer-term planning is likely to fall short of achieving what you intend to achieve!
